English 487 - Course Schedule


SECONDARY READING LIST NOT YET FINAL.
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English 487: Home: A Cultural Romance
Contemporary Women's Writing in the Americas

Professor Hilary Justice
STV 421E - hjustic at ilstu dot edu
Office Hours: TBA

Please use email to contact me as I am not in my office every day. I check email at least twice a day, M-F, between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.

Course Description

Home: A Cultural Romance – Contemporary Women’s Writing in the Americas

This course will examine how contemporary women writers in the Americas refract questions of “Americanness” through lenses of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and immigration. By triangulating primary literary texts, space/place theory, and secondary readings (on related issues of domesticity, biography, ecology, geography and community), we will consider the postulate that contemporary writers and publishers have created a new genre of romance, in which the idea of home has replaced the “muscular hottie” of 1970s romance and horror novels as the locus of desire – with its attendant fantasies and nightmares – for contemporary American women readers.

Required Texts

Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place
Dorothy Allison, Bastard out of Carolina
Julia Alvarez, ¡Yo!
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Annie Dillard, An American Childhood
Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine
Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café
Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban
Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys
Sheri Reynolds, The Rapture of Canaan
Rebecca Wells, The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (A Novel)

(Additional readings include excerpts from: Thoreau, Walden; Woolf, A Room of One’s Own; Anderson, Imagined Communities; Gilbert & Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic; Bhaba, The Location of Culture; Radway, Reading the Romance; Hiss, The Experience of Place; Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City; Pindell, A Good Place to Live – America’s Last Migration; Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life; Gillis, A World of their Own Making; Keith & Pile (Eds.), Place and the Politics of Identity; Feld & Basso, Senses of Place; Soja, Postmodern Geographies; Turner, Spirit of Place: The Making of an American Literary Landscape; Warren, Ecological Feminist Philosophies; Friedan, The Feminine Mystique; and non-fiction works by several contemporary women writers, including Terry Tempest Williams, Carolyn Steedman, Gretel Ehrlich, Alison Hawthorne Dening, Anne Lamott, Maxine Kumin and Kathleen Norris.)

Link to Recommended Reading

Format

This course will be conducted as a seminar. Course assignments will include a short excursus, a short topic paper, and a final project (20-25 pp.). Auditors are welcome.

Grades

Class Participation (includes contribution to in-class discussion and discussions during office hours or via email) - 15%
Three Excurses (2-3 pp. papers summarizing critical reading and synthesizing with readings; to be shared with the class; may be used to build toward final projects) - 15% each
Topic Paper (5-7 pp. paper focusing narrowly on one issue at play in the course; may be used to build toward final project) - 15%
Final Project (specifics to be individually negotiated with professor; benchmark figure = M.A. students 15-20 pp.; Ph.D. students 25-30 pp.) - 25%

To succeed in this class you must a) engage thoughtfully and actively with all aspects of the course and synthesize provided materials with your own research and reflection; b) by the end of the course have developed original ideas demonstrating a level of sophistication and subtlety appropriate to your progress in your individual degree program; c) display a professional level of writing, including rhetorical positioning, argumentation, structure, organization, mechanics, citation format, clarity, subtlety; and d) complete all assignments in a timely manner.


Reading Schedule

Week 1

Course Introduction

Week 2

Reading for this week's discussion:

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood
Yi-Fu Tuan, ***TBA***


Week 3

Reading for this week's discussion:

Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Gilbert & Gubar, Introduction, The Madwoman in the Attic


Week 4

Reading for this week's discussion:

Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-Stop Cafe


Week 5

Reading for this week's discussion:

Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina


Week 6

Reading for this week's discussion:

Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (A Novel)


Week 7

Reading for this week's discussion:

Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine


Week 8

Reading for this week's discussion:

Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams


Week 9

Reading for this week's discussion:

Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate


Week 10

Reading for this week's discussion:

Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban


Week 11

Reading for this week's discussion:

Julia Alvarez, ¡Yo!


Week 12

Reading for this week's discussion:

Toni Morrison, Beloved


Week 13

Reading for this week's discussion:

Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys


Week 14

Reading for this week's discussion:

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale


Week 15

Reading for this week's discussion:

Sheri Reynolds, The Rapture of Canaan